the Cancer Therapy Advisor take:

According to a new study published in the Journal of Thoracic Oncology, Asian patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and Bcl-2-like protein 11 (BIM) deletion who were treated with an epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI) or chemotherapy had a shorter progression-free survival (PFS) compared with those who did not have the deletion.

They also found that BIM deletion independently determines overall survival (OS) of patients with advanced NSCLC.

Researchers at the National Taiwan University Hospital in Taipei City, Taiwan, analyzed survival outcomes of 204 patients with advanced NSCLC with the BIM deletion who were treated with either chemotherapy or EGFR TKIs. They found that a median PFS of 4.6 months in patients with BIM deletion who were treated with EGFR TKIs compared with 8.6 months in those with wild type mutations (p=0.002).

In addition, the researchers observed a median PFS of 3.5 months in patients with BIM deletion who were treated with chemotherapy versus 5.6 months in wild type patients (p=0.016).

James Chih-Hsin Yang, MD, PhD, of the National Taiwan University Hospital suggests that future clinical studies should also stratify Asian NSCLC patients based on the BIM deletion polymorphism.

Also, BIM deletion independently predicts overall survival (OS) of advanced NSCLC patients. The BIM protein can activate the programmed cell death also known as the apoptotic pathway in cells. BIM deletion has been detected in 12.8% of the Asian population but is very rarely observed in the Caucasian population.

All NSCLC patients treated with any therapy, targeted or chemotherapeutic, ultimately fail their therapy but at varying times.

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